Who Are Those Guys #6 (Gals Edition)

September 30, 2012

Time for more crowd-sourcing while I attend to other matters. This one’s a long shot, but let’s give it a try.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the live Studio One broadcast “The Traveling Lady.” Like many live TV shows, this one has no end credits. When a live show ran long, the credits were, naturally, the first thing to be clipped for time. (Conversely, if you see a kinescope where the credit roll drags on for four minutes, you know that something went wrong and the cast and crew were frantically stretching to fill the time slot.) This represents a huge historical loss, since few contemporary reviews or archived press releases seem to preserve any of the missing data.

So, for “The Traveling Lady,” we have only the opening credits, which are stingy. They dole out writer (Horton Foote), producer (Herbert Brodkin), director (Robert Mulligan), and only five actors: Kim Stanley, Steven Hill, Robert Loggia, Doreen Lang, and “special guest star” Mildred Dunnock. No technical crew, and no supporting cast.

Left out were a few actors with sizable roles. The most recognizable of which, the kindly-looking gentleman above, played the town judge in the first scene. That’s Fred Stewart, a New York-based stage actor probably best remembered as Natalie Wood’s father in Splendor in the Grass (1961).

Also omitted are the child actor who played Stanley’s daughter – a large and very professional performance (children on live television: a disaster waiting to happen!) – and the two town busybodies pictured below. “Miss Tillman” is on the left (the mother of Lang’s character), and “Sitter Mavis” on the right (the daughter of Dunnock’s character). (You can tell from the characters’ names the extent to which Foote was under the influence of Tennessee Williams at this stage!)

The Internet Movie Database identifies one Wendy Hillier (no, not Wendy Hiller!) as the child, “Margaret Rose,” and one Ann Hennessey as “Sitter Mavis.” Hennessey has a number of Broadway and Off-Broadway credits up through the mid-sixties, and then seems to disappear. I can’t find any biographical information about her, nor an obituary or even a photo or film clip that would confirm that this is her in “The Traveling Lady.”

As for “Miss Tillman,” the IMDb doesn’t have a guess as to her identity. The role was played on Broadway, in 1954, by Kathleen Comegys, an actress who had small roles in a number of live TV shows from this period, and in Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker (1962). Even though the Studio One broadcast of “The Traveling Lady” did not carry over any of the rest of the Broadway cast, there is a resemblance, and I wonder if this might be her.

Can anyone out there confirm or refute any of these guesses? (And yes, I’m characterizing the IMDb info as guesswork until I know the source.)

3 Responses to “Who Are Those Guys #6 (Gals Edition)”

Why, thank you, Patrick. I’m touched by your kind words. Incidentally, your comment originally contained a link to a site selling illegal bootleg DVDs. I’m sure you didn’t mean to include THAT, so I have helpfully removed it for you.